Yesterday, we experienced three different modes of public engagement. We started our meeting at one of the POPOS (Privately Owned Private Open Spaces) at the 1 Kearny building. We then headed to meet with Mona Caron, a visual artist, muralist, and illustrator residing in San Francisco. After hearing talk about her process, we headed to the event “Flipping the Switch to Light Up Central Market.”

Chapter 1 is entitled “The Neuronal Power” and sets out with the claim that frames the entire essay: “Every age has its main maladies.” Han differentiates the bacterial age that ended (at the latest) with the discovery of antibiotics, the viral age that ended with the advance of immunology, and finally the present age: the neuronal age. Its dominant maladies are neurological illnesses like depression, ADHD, borderline personality syndrome and burnout syndrome. The crucial difference between maladies of the viral age and the neuronal age is that between infection and infarction. An infection is caused by the negativity of the immunological other, whereas an infarct is the result of an excess of positivity. Unlike a virus, neuronal illnesses cannot simply be warded off like an outside attacker. Text Via axylus

Ubiquitous Photography by Martin Hand. 1st Edition.

Ubiquitous Photography provides a critical examination of the technologies, practices, and cultural significance of digital photography, placing the phenomenon in historical, social, and political-economic context. It examines shifts in image-making, storage, commodification, and interpretation as highly significant processes of digitally mediated communication in an increasingly image-rich culture. It covers debates in social and cultural theory, the history and politics of image-making and manipulation, the current explosion in amateur photography, tagging and sharing via social networking, and citizen journalism. The book engages with key contemporary theoretical issues about memory and mobility, authorship and authenticity, immediacy and preservation, and the increased visibility of ordinary social life.

Smartphones, laptops, tablets, and e-readers all at one time held the promise of a more environmentally healthy world not dependent on paper and deforestation. The result of our ubiquitous digital lives is, as we see in The Anthrobscene, actually quite the opposite: not ecological health but an environmental wasteland, where media never die. Jussi Parikka critiques corporate and human desires as a geophysical force, analyzing the material side of the earth as essential for the existence of media and introducing the notion of an alternative deep time in which media live on in the layer of toxic waste we will leave behind as our geological legacy.

“History is not an exclusively human affair, quite the opposite…It is unthinkable as well as unlivable outside the multi-species cat’s cradle games.” –Donna Haraway.

View north from the summit of Gunung Besar (Daniel Quinn, October 2011)

The Meratus Mountains is a mountain range in the Indonesian province of South Kalimantan, on Borneo island. The mountains run in a north-south arc that divides South Kalimantan province into two almost equal parts.

Ethnosphere refers to both the accumulation of living cultures and the ancient lineages from which they evolved. Ethnobotanist and anthropologist Wade Davis coined ethnosphere in his book Light at the Edge of the World.

“Indigenous people are neither sentimental nor weakened by nostalgia.There’s not a lot of room for either in the malarial swamps of the Asmat or the chilling winds of Tibet. But they have, nevertheless, through time and ritual, forged a traditional mystique of the Earth that is based not on the idea of being self-consciously ‘close’ to it, but on a far subtler intuition: the idea that the Earth itself can only exist because it is breathed into being by human consciousness. Now, what does that mean? It means that a young kid from the Andes who is raised to believe that that mountain is an Apu spirit that will direct his or her destiny will be a profoundly different human being and have a different relationship to that resource, or that place, than a young kid from Montana raised to believe that a mountain is a pile of rock ready to be mined. Whether it’s an abode of spirit or a pile of ore is irrelevant; what’s interesting is the metaphor that defines the relationship between the individual and the natural world.”–Wade Davis

ALUNA is made by and with the KOGI, a genuine lost civilization hidden on an isolated triangular pyramid mountain in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Colombia, nearly five miles high, on the Colombian-Caribbean coast.

“While the political theory literature on historical injustice often addresses questions of what is owed to indigenous peoples, there is limited direct engagement with how—specifically—being indigenous might influence particular rights or duties. Focusing on the ways that indigeneity is defined and used might influence accounts of historical injustice, many of which assume that indigeneity is a legitimate, important feature of rights claims, without fully exploring what indigeneity might entail.

This is problematic, because defining indigeneity has at least two important consequences. First, it affects who has access to resources or rights reserved for indigenous peoples. While defining oneself or being defined as indigenous may have negative implications—such as those detailed above—increasingly, it may offer certain privileges in terms of rights, resources, and access to economic and symbolic reparations. Second, it shapes the kinds of privileges and resources available to indigenous peoples, including redefining development policies that are culturally appropriate, developing monitoring mechanisms to improve accountability of policies, and promoting non-discrimination and inclusion of indigenous peoples in local, national, and international laws, policies and projects. Certain conceptions of indigeneity may be driving some of these policies, thus affecting the kinds of programs organizations like the UN choose to support. For example, linking indigeneity to spiritual understandings of the land may require particular kinds of reparations not frequently considered in liberal, Western frameworks, which tend to privilege property rights over non-tangible resources or opportunities.”

Fuck for Forest is a non-profit environmental organization founded in 2004 in Norway by Leona Johansson and Tommy Hol Ellingsen. It funds itself through a website of sexually explicit videos and photographs, charging a membership fee for access. A portion of funds are donated to the cause of rescuing the world’s rainforests.

Directed by Imre Azem, Ecumenopolis tell the story of Istanbul and other Mega-Cities on a neo-liberal course to destruction. It follows the story of a migrant family on their on-going struggle for housing rights, and provides an in-depth context into the ongoing protests currently going on in Turkey. In this way, it presents an insightful picture of the history urban development, the pursuit of modernization, and the resulting effects.

“Based on the work of famed architect and urban planner Jan Gehl and his visionary work transforming urban environments from traffic-congested streets and cold urban landscapes into havens for people and real human interaction. Gehl has been leading a revolution in urban planning that has been transforming cities worldwide. From the expanded pedestrian spaces in New York’s Times Square, to Copenhagen’s famed bike lanes, to the rebuilding of earthquake devastated Christchurch New Zealand, Gehl’s team bring real solutions that promise a more humanistic dimension to cities where people are not displaced by congested streets, skyscrapers, and the car-centric urbanism of the 1960s and ’70s.”

HERE, a project by Glenn Robert Lym Architect AIA/PhD, is a series of video films that look at architecture from the perspective of the San Francisco Bay Area. Most episodes examine Bay Area buildings and landscapes. Some venture to other parts of America and beyond.

This is the story of how a massive erasure of landscape occurred in early San Francisco, motivated by explosive population growth and fueled by an influx of mining and industrial wealth. Without second thought, San Francisco transformed sand dunes, hollows, creeks, marshes and bay waters into the flat lands now known as Market Street, South of Market, the Mission District, South Beach, the Financial District, Union Square and the Tenderloin.